Is Your Business Ready for COVID-19?

Global Map of locations with confirmed COVID-19 Cases as of 11:00 a.m. ET February 26, 2020, based on WHO data

As an author, I like to write about events and stories at the intersection of emerging social, political and technological changes and the challenges they produce. I especially like fiction that's ripped from the pages of the latest news story or social media post that's gone viral. Much of my writing--both fiction and non-fiction--is informed by my experiences as a lawyer, investment banker and company CEO. On the non-fiction side, I like to write about challenging issues and innovative solutions. On the fiction side, I like to leverage things I've experienced and researched into stories that are frighteningly real and make us think.

The new coronavirus, COVID-19, will provide business and medical schools with case study material for years to come. It will also fuel the imaginations of fiction writers. Having spent years creating business continuity plans to convince big customers that our much smaller startup company could survive under adverse circumstances, I recently wrote a LinkedIn article focusing on what businesses should be doing to prepare for COVID-19. It's reprinted below:

When gold prices spike, the Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 6.6% in two days, Treasuries hit an all-time low and the CDC admits it’s just a matter of time before COVID-19 spreads in the U.S., it’s a good time to brush off your Business Continuity Plan and decide whether it offers any useful guidance for contingencies like this. Unless your plan is remarkably comprehensive (and prescient), you may find that the topics provide a nice outline and some encouraging generalities, but little detail about what to do when a previously unknown virus is hop-skipping around the world and heading our way. Recognizing that no one has the information needed to understand what’s happening, much less what’s going to happen, the reality is we are all behind in preparing for COVID-19.

Below are suggestions on a few areas that businesses need to consider as they review beef up their business continuity plans to be ready for COVID-19.

Three points on context. First, these suggestions assume some meaningful illness, deaths and economic impact in the U.S., with initial high-profile hotspots that will spread more broadly over the weeks and months ahead—but fall short of a national disaster. Second, they assume that over reaction, panic and bad judgment by local and national leaders will be among the challenges the virus will bring—and that businesses will need to face. Third, they assume Americans will be surprised about the extent of the virus’ spread once the U.S. is able to more fully deploy the COVID-19 test kits that so far have not seen national distribution pending correction of accuracy issues. None of these three may be correct, but they inform the scope of the suggestions below. As you think about these and other factors that affect relative risk, remember two realities: (1) global and local conditions will almost certainly change quickly, giving you little time to assess and react; and (2) as we are already seeing, the virus will initially jump from place to place, creating hot zones in unexpected areas virtually overnight.

Supply Chain. Assess and plan for disruptions in whatever supply chain you have. Focus on parts that go into products as well as finished products. Translate what we’re seeing in China to other global manufacturing areas like North Korea, Japan, Northern Italy and Germany, including the U.S. Even if the virus fades as summer moves in, it may take weeks or months for your supply chain to recover.

People. Decide how you will handle your employees under myriad circumstances: if they or their family members become ill, if schools are closed and they cannot arrange child care, if they are required to stay home, if they are fearful of coming to work and so on. Will you limit their sick pay? Will you offer paid or unpaid time off to some or all? Will you lay them off? Fire them? Will you let them know in advance, or leave them wondering whether they should take that job down the street where they know the answers?

Working from Home. If people need to work from home, do they have the ability, training and technology resources to do so? Could they do their jobs from home even if you wanted them to? (Easy for a salesperson with a laptop, impractical for a waiter or a person who assembles products. What about those in between?) Do you need to develop procedures that would allow additional jobs to be performed at home? Do you need to buy laptops for some people who use desktops at work? What about your office servers and network? Where are they located? Can you still operate remotely if your building is locked down? What about the cyber security you need to safely allow remote access and work? (As more people work from home in emergency situations, hackers will have a field day with systems that fail to have adequate security infrastructure.) Do you require two-factor authentication for remote access to the company network or cloud storage? Can employees access a secure VPN for any internet access they need? Is employee access to your company network guarded by an SSL certificate or other technology that assures security for data in transit? Is access to your company network segmented based on employee security level and need to know? Have you tested what you need to test, including capacity for simultaneous users? (By the way, these concerns don’t need a virus to be important.)

Financial Resources. Do you have the financial resources to survive? Can you manage unexpected disruptions in raw materials, employee availability or revenues? Do you need to defer expenditures to build cash? Should you try to arrange a line of credit, or draw on one you have, while you still can? (Banks may not allow draws if your financial condition deteriorates.)

Office Supplies and Equipment. The Supply Chain issues also apply to the office supplies and equipment you use in your business. Do you need to buy more of anything now to assure availability when you need it? Better firewalls that can handle two-factor authentication? A few extra laptops? The new printer you’ve been putting off? New smart phones? More inventory of day-to-day supplies?

Healthy Environment. What about your efforts to provide a healthy environment for your employees and your customers? Do you need more hand sanitizer? Vinyl gloves? Could face masks make sense for any of your employees, either to protect them or make customers more comfortable? Do you need to buy a forehead thermometer for your first aid supplies? Should you suspend your efforts to eliminate disposable coffee cups for a while, particularly for guests? Do you have a policy on when employees who may be ill can come to work and when they must stay home? How about a policy about coming to work when an immediate family member has COVID-19, or the flu, or some other contagious disease? And will they be paid if they stay home?

Travel. How will you handle employee travel? Beyond the actual risk of contagion on a plane or train, how will you assess the risk of having employees suddenly quarantined for 14 days in some distant place? How will you assess employee and family fears about the risks of travel? Where will you get the information you and they need to consider the risks?

Employee Preparation. Should you do anything to help your employees prepare for spreading illness? One of the things we’ve realized in Florida is that employees perform better at work when they’re not worried about what they need to do at home to prepare for a hurricane. How can you help your employees feel they’ve done what they can to keep their families safe? Do they need your thoughts on laying in extra supplies? What if schools are closed in your county? Regardless of the specifics, they need to know you care.

Uncertainty. Markets, customers and employees all abhor uncertainty. How will you manage the challenges of quickly changing conditions that will affect your decisions? How will you create the transparency you need with your customers and employees to maintain their trust and support? Remaining quiet or holding back information because you don’t know enough to decide can easily be read as lack of concern or a conscious effort to cover up bad news. Perception quickly becomes reality when fears about personal and family health and business survival are involved.

Sandbox Exercises. Too many business continuity plans are good on boilerplate and weak on details, especially on rare subjects like a spreading virus. Governments, hospitals, banks and cyber security firms have learned that that sandbox exercises—war games—are essential to testing and improving these plans. Whether you do a full-fledged exercise or simply sit around a table with your team and brainstorm sets of changing assumptions, you need to test, assess and remediate your solutions before conditions get really rough. And you need to keep doing it.

While it’s easy to put these things off while so much remains uncertain, don’t kid yourself. Conditions will change quickly. Some things may gain clarity, but other things will remain uncertain. You don’t have to come up with final answers, but you do need to begin. Issue identification is the first step. Saying "it depends" about how you would respond to an issue is fine, as long as you consider the parameters that would guide your answer. Waiting until your building has been quarantined or your schools have been closed is not the time to start thinking about what you would do, or what you should tell your customers or the employees who are lined up outside your door.